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Lingual and Acoustic Differences in EWE Oral and Nasal Vowels

Published: 24 February 2019 Publication History

Abstract

It is an evidence that the production of nasal vowels involves not only the opening of the velopharyngeal port but also the lingual gesture variation. We tested the hypothesis that EWE speakers adjust tongue height to enhance the change in F1 due to the nasalization, by investigating simultaneously the physical configuration of the tongue and the acoustic output. It was found that EWE nasal vowels are produced with a higher and more forward tongue position than their oral counterparts, except /ẽ/ produced with a more retracted tongue position, and /õ/ produced with a lower and more retracted tongue position. We concluded that the lingual configuration of EWE nasal vowels differs from that of their oral congeners, enhancing the effect of the velum lowering on nasal vowels. Nevertheless, from the results, we suggested that the acoustic effects of nasalization on formants would not only depend on the adjustment of the tongue but a combination of multiples articulators.

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    ICDSP '19: Proceedings of the 2019 3rd International Conference on Digital Signal Processing
    February 2019
    170 pages
    ISBN:9781450362047
    DOI:10.1145/3316551
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 24 February 2019

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    Author Tags

    1. Acoustic
    2. Articulation
    3. EWE vowels
    4. Nasalization
    5. Smoothing spline ANOVA
    6. Ultrasound

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    ICDSP 2019
    ICDSP 2019: 2019 3rd International Conference on Digital Signal Processing
    February 24 - 26, 2019
    Jeju Island, Republic of Korea

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